The womanising Soviet spy who helped rescue MI5

In 1971, Oleg Lyalin, a Soviet trade representative to the UK, was arrested for drink driving, the Soviet Embassy posted bail and ordered him home, but Lyalin had other ideas.

He presented himself to MI5, revealed he’d been working as a Soviet spy and sought asylum.

The CIA and MI5 had been worried for a decade about such an approach, fearing it was to plant disinformation among Western intelligence agencies.

But Lyalin, it transpired, was the real deal.

His story is told in The Defector: The Untold Story Of The KGB Agent Who Saved MI5 And Changed The Cold War, a new book by British author and film-maker Richard Kerbaj, drawing on recently declassified British documents.

At the time Lyalin approached the British authorities the CIA was at peak paranoia, Kerbaj told RNZ’s Nine to Noon, and British security service MI5 was at a very low ebb.

“You had the [Guy] Burgess and [Donald] McLean defections in 1950, followed by a number of others, including, of course, the big one, Kim Philby in 1963.”

MI5 was spooked and so turned to the CIA for guidance and advice, he says.

“And the CIA, were quite paranoid themselves about what the KGB was up to and what it was capable of doing.”

The CIA infected MI5 with its paranoia, he says, leading to a number of mole hunts.

“Including an investigation into MI5's Deputy Director General, a man called Graham Mitchell, and also MI5's Director General. So, you can imagine what it's like investigating the boss and the former deputy boss.

“And there was also concern that was raised by the CIA that Harold Wilson, who was the Prime Minister of the day in the UK, was also a Soviet agent.”

MI5 got carried away at this time, he says, looking internally and in so doing over-estimated the threat the KGB posed and yet overlooked its wider operations in the UK.

“Because it was so blinded by the mole hunt, so that created a contamination of intelligence which led up to a huge shift in thinking in 1971”

Meanwhile, MI5 was beginning to doubt the veracity of intel it was getting from the CIA and so Lyalin’s approach was perfect timing, Kerbaj says.

Lyalin had been trained up in the Soviet Union’s 'Department V' the assassinations and sabotage department at the KGB.

“He was here to plot against Britain, specifically, to draw up contingency plans to assassinate politicians, to attack Britain's emergency food supplies, to attack Britain's military sites. They even had a plan to contaminate Britain's seawater with radioactive waste to blame that on the US.”

Lyalin’s motives for giving himself up were more to do with his tangled love life rather than geopolitics, Kerbaj says.

“He said, listen, my social life's getting in the way, I have four girlfriends, and my wife is unhappy with that. And I'm hoping to return to Moscow to divorce my wife and be with one of my girlfriends.”

“Of course, MI5 thought two things, this guy's potentially insane. But also, they thought what if he's one of these guys that we've been warned about for the last 10 years by the CIA?”

Lyalin revealed a vast espionage network within the UK and it convinced MI5 to trigger a mass expulsion. A decision they kept to themselves, he says.

“Ted Heath, the Prime Minister of the day, was concerned that President Nixon would try and kill that because, of course, Nixon was trying to preserve the detente at the time.”

Detente was a foreign policy strategy aimed at relaxing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union.

 “They withheld the information about both the case relating to Lyalin and also the case relating to the expulsion until after the event.

“And of course, that irritated the Americans. But had they not done that, they could not have achieved that triumph that they did.”

The expulsion of 105 Soviet spies had long-lasting implications, he says.

“The impact was enormous on the KGB itself, which at the time was being run by Yuri Andropov, who of course many years later would go on to become the head of state.

“Andropov was determined to try and preserve Department V, the sabotage and assassinations department. But as a result of Lyalin's defection, and as a result of the information he provided about the individuals within the department, and the activities of the department, the department was forced to shut down.”

It would stay shut until Vladimir Putin revived it in the 1990s, he says.

“And the first target they went after was Alexander Litvinenko in London.

“Litvinenko, of course, was the Russian dissident who defected to the UK in 2000 with his family, with his wife and son. And then he was poisoned with polonium-210, a radioactive substance in 2006.”